R. A. Salvatore Quotes

I read books for exams at school, but only because I had to read them, and really didn't enjoy it one little bit! The only time I did enjoy it was when I was asked to read out loud in front of the class, as I then used it as an acting exercise!

I wasn't dyslexic, I was just very slow. I passed my time daydreaming.

I realized what Led Zeppelin was about around the end of our first U.S. tour. We started off not even on the bill in Denver, and by the time we got to New York we were second to Iron Butterfly, and they didn't want to go on!

A lot of children, like I did, move away from words because of the fear - which is something you have to take out of education: the fear of worrying about what marks you'll get, detention, worrying about letting people down, your parents, teachers.

I would just sweat so much. I'd be dry when I run on the stage. By the time I got in front of the microphone, it just, just like a river pouring out. I don't know what made that happen. It took five years for that to stop happening to me.

I'm good at separating my personal life from racing. When I'm at track, it's race time; when I'm away from it, other than the fact I'm training to be fit for it, there is nothing at home that makes me even want to think about racing. I just want to enjoy my life, and by the time the next race comes around, I'm ready and excited for it.

I was pretty anti-academic, and I wasn't much of a student. I had a really short attention span and did not get a lot out of high school academically. I think college was a little the same way.

By the time I was a young man, I lived with two deep struggles: I longed to become a cricketer, and I performed miserably in school. Cricket and tennis were all that I lived for. In India, this was a formula for failure.

If I started at 13, by the time I was 14 I was already good enough to play in front of people. I started off playing drums when I was 5, so playing in front of people didn't matter - not a problem.

The trick to acting is not to show off; it's to think the thoughts of the character. I was lucky because when I started acting, it was doing jobs above pubs. I learned to act in anonymity, so by the time people saw me, I knew what I was doing. I was crap for years, but no one saw me being crap. It's a trade you learn.

I was terrible at school.

My aunt is the director of the acapella group Black Voices. I was so struck by them as a child. They sang with such passion and conviction. By the time I turned 15, I had plucked up the courage to ask if I could join the group. Acapella is a different discipline from singing with an accompaniment - it is much more exposed.

I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom - there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.

I did not like prizes at school. I didn't like tests or exams, or the 11+, or O-levels. Later I hated B.A.s and M.A.s. The reason I hated them is that I don't like being tested, failed or falsely praised by anyone.

I think no matter what you do you go through stages when you play. There was a number of times when I didn't do very well or was tired. It was too much to combine school and tennis altogether. Parents need to step in and say, take a little time off, do something fun.

At 12 I dropped out of school but I had lost interest in it at a much earlier age. For me, school was very very stressful.

I feel sorry for kids these days. They get so much homework. Remember the days when we put a belt around our two books and carried them home? Now they're dragging a suitcase. They have school all day, then homework from six until eleven. There's no time left to be creative.

I don't want my children to feel the same sense of failure I did growing up because they're not good at passing tests.

I took organic chemistry, and I got my first-ever F. I ended up going to summer school, and the whole time, I'm thinking, 'I am not good at sciences.'

From a young age, pupils are put under immense amounts of pressure in high-stakes exams. Often, they're made to feel like their whole future depends on how they perform in these narrowly focussed tests.

I'm not studious at all. I'm really far from that. I have been better at everything else. I find school terribly tiresome and boring.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

It reminded me of a meat grinder. From when I was a kid. Going to school it felt like you were in a meat grinder. It chews you up and pours out this mess that can't function

Your grades are not your destiny: they're just letters and numbers which rate how well you performed in one artificial arena, once.

The pressure on kids is high to get good grades. In my time, no one cared about it. My father looked at them but he didn't really make much fuss about them.